Dawn had settled into Hope's Peak Academy's grounds. A hazy blue hue drenched the windows and the concrete. Most of the academy's Super High School Level students were getting up for class. Climbing out of beds littered with books, slipping on dirty socks, buttoning cotton dress shirts, pulling cable-knit sweaters over their heads. Knotting ties and donning jackets. Prepared to face a new day, the young and tired hopes of the future squinted in the faint light.
Dawn had settled into Hope's Peak Academy's grounds and its proud students were getting up for class.
Junko Enoshima and Mukuro Ikusaba were just now going to bed.
"To despair is to… to despair is never to sleep…"
Junko was mumbling, toeing the line between oblivion and wakefulness. Her strawberry blonde pigtails were tied back with pink ribbons, wound around a pillow she had shifted too many times. She held her older sister in her arms, though neither would remember having gotten into that position. Mukuro's face was buried in Junko's neck, their legs intertwined; blankets half on, half off; Mukuro's sock hanging half off her left foot. They were like two kittens only days old, their sole instinct being to huddle in each other's warmth.
"…Despair is-is…" The younger twin's mouth widened with a huge yawn. "Is the nuh-nuh-i-ght, the night…"
Mukuro was making soft noises-not quite snores, more like hums and sighs that kept pace with her even breathing. Mukuro was fast asleep.
Her sister teetered in and out of consciousness but Mukuro was sound asleep like a little lamb.
"Despair is the night… in which you never close your eyes…"
Junko's head rested on her sister's, lips pressed into her hair.
The twins had been up late, up to no good-wandering the halls of the school, watching, waiting; collecting things. Things they needed. Documents printed on watermarked paper, sticky notes taped to profile reports, stranded storage keys, encoded data, sloppily kept secrets, some bubblegum and vending machine candy bars and bobby pins to hold back hair. Whatever might be useful.
Nothing could come close to the value they provided each other. A terrible, inherent awareness that without the other half, they had nothing.
One couldn't live long without the other. A palm reader had told them this at a traveling carnival in a time now lost beyond memory. By chance they offered up their small hands to a bedraggled old woman draped in shawls and hints of cinnamon, lines in her irises twisted like the roots of a wizened oak. Long, delicate fingernails drifted across each of their palms in turn. Little Junko had shuddered and retracted her arm with a pout; little Mukuro had felt her hand paralyzed, her eyes widened in fear and awe.
One couldn't live long without the other. Their souls were linked and bound by the chains of despair.
"To despair…" Junko lingered on the word, seeming to forget what came after. Or perhaps she was finally surrendering to a long and heavy sleep.
"Despair… to despair…"
Another yawn, rising from deep within her lungs, as the sun rose on the morning.
"Des-puh-puh-pair…"
"…Despair…"
Mukuro snored.
"To despair is to be dead… but to be uh-pah… to be apart from death…"
Usually it was big sisters who took care of the smaller ones, but it was Junko who had always told Mukuro bedtime stories. She was, after all, the one with all the imagination.
It was always Junko who talked to Mukuro until she fell asleep.